OAPEN-UK is a new JISC Collections project focusing on open access scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences (HSS).
The aim of OAPEN-UK is to experiment with scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences to find out if open access as a model is sustainable, and if as a consequence, the readership and reach of scholarly monographs is increased.
OAPEN-UK will partner with publishers, research councils, researchers and institutions in a practical, real time experiment that will gather qualitative and quantitative data to allow all stakeholders to make informed decisions about open access monograph publishing.
The project will work at a national level but data collected will be shared at international level.
The key objectives of the project will be to:
- undertake a UK experiment to cost, test and evaluate an open access model with a selection of high quality academic monographs in the HSS
- evaluate the experiment by measuring the impact on publishers print sales, their costs and their attitudes towards open access
- evaluate the experiment by measuring the impact on readership and reach of the research monographs
- gather information on the attitudes and perceptions of the authors, researchers, publishers and users to open access scholarly monographs
- gather information on impact to help research councils develop their policies
- explore potential roles for libraries in an open access monograph environment
- promote awareness of the issues and challenges of open access monographs
- share the results of OAPEN-UK and disseminate the findings at an international level
The ideal would be to discover that an OA business model is not only feasible and sustainable but that the free availability of scholarly monographs results in positive impacts for all stakeholders, especially researchers. How likely we are of reaching this ideal, well that can only be found out through research and testing.
The first step of the project is to invite publishers to participate in the project through an invitation to tender. The tender requests publishers to submit scholarly monographs titles in the humanities and social sciences for inclusion in the project.
The invitation will be released in October and there will be a briefing event for publishers on Wednesday 27th October between 10 and 12.30 at the JISC Collections offices in London.
If you would like to attend the briefing event and find out more about this new project, please contact Caren Milloy.
